elements are important today” (Yates as cited in Price, 2022, p. 181). Version 9.0 is purported to represent, “a more stripped-back and teachable curriculum that identifies the essential content” that all young Australians should learn (ACARA, 2022a). It also aims to deepen:
… students’ understanding of First Nations Australian histories and cultures, the impact on – and perspectives of – First Nations Australians of the arrival of British settlers as well as their contribution to the building of modern Australia. (ACARA, 2022a)
Importantly, in the latest version, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander CCP
… is composed of three interconnected aspects of Country/Place, Culture and People (ACARA, 2022). The stated intentions of the aspect of County/Place include recognising connections to Country, positioning First Nations Australians as Traditional Owners and acknowledging the impact of colonisation. The Culture aspect includes examining First Nations cultural diversity, recognising First Nations cultures as the world’s oldest and as continuous, and clarifying that Indigenous cultures are internationally enshrined. The People aspect includes acknowledging over 60,000 years of occupation, highlighting a diversity of First Nations peoples, and examining the sophisticated social systems, kinship structures, protocols and contributions of First Nations peoples. (Maher, 2022, p. 4)
These are welcome developments. However, it must be remembered that curriculum construction is a power-laden and political act (Apple, 2013). In many ways, the AC continues a selective tradition of establishing whose knowledge is important, how it should be learned and organised, and whether it is sufficiently important to be formally assessed. Ongoing criticisms include “the lack of clarity around what to embed, where to embed and how to embed the [Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander] CCP (Anderson et al., 2022; Henderson, 2020) and a claim that [First Nations] content tends to be reduced and trivialised (Anderson et al., 2022; Parkinson & Jones, 2019)” (Maher, 2022, p. 4). The fact that the AC remains tethered to national performativity and accountability mechanisms that prioritise White knowledge, while Indigenous knowledges remain, in principle, optional (Salter & Maxwell, 2016), is a matter of overarching concern. As Burgess and colleagues (2022) explain, if Indigenous knowledges are not officially prioritised, for example in the way that the NAPLAN or PISA testing is, then they are less likely to be viewed as important by teachers and principals who are increasingly at ‘breaking point’
(Windle et al., 2022). Furthermore, whilst demonstrating concern for First Nations perspectives, the current version of the AC builds on and reproduces Anglo-Centric traditions (Hradsky, 2022; Maher, 2022).
Realistically, Indigenous knowledges have never been centralised in Australian mainstream school curriculum (Lowe & Yunkaporta, 2013). Typically, such knowledges are disaggregated, compartmentalised, ignored, tokenised, or positioned as sidelines to the main event (Burgess, Bishop
& Lowe, 2022; Guenther et al., 2021; Bullen & Flavell, 2022). Despite the educational goals for all young Australians set out by the Mparntwe Declaration (Education Council, 2019) – i.e. to ensure that all students learn about First Nations peoples and knowledges and that all First Nations students thrive – the Australian Government Department of Education and Training (2021) states that the foremost purpose of Australian schooling is to ensure “Australia’s future prosperity and to remain competitive internationally” (as cited in Wilson & Spillman, 2021, p. 57). This establishes a hierarchy in which the
holistic, relational, and interconnected nature of Aboriginal knowledge systems, which are not
‘officially tested’ (Burgess et al., 2022, p. 161), are positioned as secondary to the individualistic and competitive elements of the AC, which are tested. The dominance of individualistic, competitive, oftentimes decontextualised, static, Anglo-Centric orientations to education thus form part of a deeply entrenched history of assimilatory practices in schooling that, along with the complex legacies of racism explored earlier (see also Bodkin-Andrews & Carlson, 2016; Bodkin-Andrews et al., 2021), underpin the continued marginalisation of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies (Buxton as cited in Burgess et al., 2022, p. 158).
Adding to this picture is the aforementioned lack of uniform teacher education across Australia that centralises Indigenous knowledges, as well as a scarcity of high-quality in-service PL and support for teachers and leaders (MacGill, 2022; Lowe & Galstaun, 2020) – this is despite a growing body of literature and research aimed at redressing this lacuna.24 This combination of factors underpins persistent teacher apprehension to embrace First Nations perspectives (Maher, 2022), which is exacerbated by political debates that position Indigenous content as unimportant, controversial or optional (Salter & Maxwell, 2016). The 2014 AC review,25 for example, concluded that the history curriculum should better ‘recognise and celebrate Western civilisation’ (Sriprakash, Rudolph & Gerard, 2022) – the implication being that First Nations and Western knowledge systems exist in a zero-sum relationship, with the former being a threat to the latter. Political backlash during the more recent 2021 review included similar concerns with (now former) Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge suggesting that the proposed changes to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander CCP – which called for more honesty in confronting the histories and experiences of First Nations Australians – would risk
‘dishonouring our Western heritage’ (Riddle, 2021)26 seeding a ‘hatred of country’ in students that may dilute their willingness to eventually ‘protect the nation through military service’ (Hurst, 2021).
Rhetoric of this kind codes Indigenous perspectives as dangerous and problematic and weakens the open ‘truth-telling’ required for reconciliation (Hradsky, 2022). Burgess and colleagues (2022) argue that, in the light of such ongoing political resistance, “the purpose of curriculum [in Australia] is to reinforce western dominance, leaving little room for diverse perspectives, worldviews, and interpretations of reality” (pp. 160-61).
Whilst the task of decolonising curriculum is therefore complex and contested, there is still much that can be done. When all educational staff gradually develop understanding of First Nations histories and experiences of coloniality, “recognition of the ethical importance of finding authentic ways to teach Indigenous knowledges” is nurtured (Lowe & Galstaun, 2020, p. 94). The idea is not to replace Western knowledge but to bring Indigenous and Western knowledge systems into dialogue such that worldviews are expanded, relationships are forged, and power imbalances redressed (Andreotti, 2011; Fregoso Bailón & De Lissovoy, 2019; Rigney & Kelly, 2021). Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2018) distinguishes between hegemonic and decolonial knowledge processes: in the hegemonic form of knowledge, we know by creating order; decolonial thinking asks us to know by creating solidarity.
Educators can build ‘knowledge solidarity’ by making genuine space for and valuing Indigenous
24 Of note is the current Australian Research Council (ARC) project in South Australia, Culturally Responsive Schooling (DP220100651, 2022-24), led by Distinguished Professor Lester-Irabinna Rigney from the Narungga, Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri nations, and the Culturally Nourishing Schooling project across NSW and Queensland led by proud Gubbi Gubbi man Associate Professor Kevin Lowe.
25 Co-led by well-known conservative education advocates Kenneth Wiltshire and Kevin Donnelly (2014).
26 https://www.aare.edu.au/blog/?p=9311.
knowledges while appreciating that despite the Western impulse to claim a stronghold on Truth, there are multiple ways of knowing the world. Morrison and colleagues (2019) describe this in terms of developing cultural humility: the appreciation that no-one knows it all. There is value in opening to a diversity of worldviews and ways of being, especially with respect to cultures that connect people, Country, place, and more-than-human beings during a time when ‘cultural sustainability’ of such knowledges intersects so crucially with the environmental sustainability on which we all depend (Acton et al., 2017). This process, however, starts with knowing oneself (Rose, 2013; Morrison et al., 2019; Vass, 2017; Maher, 2022), for as de Sousa Santos further explicates,
[T]he world is organized in such a way that, in order to function well, the structures [of domination] need the complicity of those who internalize them (Bourdieu 2003).
Thus, any struggle [towards social, cultural and educational equity] must begin with the struggle against oneself. (de Sousa Santos, 2018, p. 64)
MacGill (2022) and Lowe and Galstaun (2020) suggest that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural immersion programmes such as workshops, camps or retreats can be particularly useful starting points for the dual purpose of decolonising the mind and to Indigenise curriculum. When carefully facilitated, immersion programmes can give educators time to absorb new pedagogical practices and shift people’s worldviews through face-to-face encounters with First Nations peoples.
MacGill (2022) adds that “agentic possibilities emerge from epistemological shifts where teachers are given time, space, and support to reread the curriculum anew and find intersectional points to integrate rather than bolt on the [Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander] CCP” (MacGill, 2022, p. 186).
Harrison and Skrebneva (2020) agree that immersion ‘in’ Country27 has multiple benefits, including strengthening connections between people, places, histories, and imagined futures. They say,
“Country is positioned in the curriculum as a priority concept because it has the power to promote a sense of belonging, particularly among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students” (p. 17). Likewise, Burgess et al. (2022) argue that Country-centred learning led by local Aboriginal community members – an approach and programme that they call Learning from Country – can awaken teachers’ critical consciousness, challenge power relations that silence Aboriginal peoples, and assist teachers to develop holistic rather than piecemeal approaches to integrating First Nations perspectives by, importantly, moving from ‘representational’ to ‘relational’ orientations to curriculum.
Relationality emphasises that knowledge is not merely a ‘static’ entity learned through detached consumption inside “concrete structures where Western knowledge […] is privileged and presented via decontextualised and homogenised texts” (Lowe & Weuffen, 2022, p. 3). As Trawlwulwuy woman from Tebrakunna country in northeast Tasmania Lauren Tynan (2021) explains, “Country sits at the heart of coming to know and understand relationality as it is the web that connects humans to a system of Lore/Law and knowledge that can never be human-centric. […] Relationality belongs with and is learnt from Country” (pp. 1-2). Brennan (2022, p. 85) adds that knowledge is ‘living’ and is produced relationally through being with one another, connecting to place, and thus by appreciating curriculum as an active project and ‘verb’. Brennan (2022) suggests that, where possible, building curriculum around inquiry processes in which teachers and students learn together thus offers vital means of disrupting ‘curriculum-as-usual’, positioning students as knowledge workers who are open
27 Lowe, Skrebneva, Burgess, Harrison and Vass (2021) suggest that when Country is understood as curriculum and pedagogy, this enables “a deeper, ontological and political learning” via which students are located “in Country rather than on and controlling land” (p. 472).
to place-based learning, positioning knowledge as co-created and alive, and positioning teachers, not as experts who must ‘know it all’, but as co-learners and co-inquirers (Maher, 2022).
In Burgess et al.’s (2022) Learning from Country (LFC) programme, a critical step involved “building relationships with Aboriginal community-based educators to develop skills to engage with local Aboriginal families and communities” (2022, p. 163). In this formulation, LFC requires building relationships beyond the school gates and remunerating Aboriginal community-based educators appropriately (Bishop, Vass & Thompson, 2021). However, LFC does not require that learning be moved beyond the space where schools are already situated. Burgess et al. (2022) explain:
Learning from Country (LFC) means learning from Aboriginal peoples, cultures, histories, sites, and all that Country entails including the interdependent ecologies of the land, waterways, and seas. The urban context is significant as most non-Aboriginal people do not perceive urban places as Aboriginal places, as Porter (2018) notes, ‘this urban country is also urban Country’ (p. 239, emphasis in original). This notion confronts stereotypes that position ‘real’ Aboriginal people as living in the ‘outback’
or ‘bush’, and therefore one must travel to remote Australia to experience an
‘authentic’ Aboriginal culture. (Burgess et al., 2022, pp. 162-63)
Burgess and colleagues’ (2022) project thus had the benefit of opening pre-service teachers’ eyes “to another reality that’s all around them” (Aboriginal community-based educator Uncle Ken, as cited in Burgess et al., 2022, p. 165). This resonates with Hamm’s (2015) place-based approach to curriculum entitled ‘place-thought-walk’. She says, place-thought-walk is “a starting point for thinking about the places around [us] in a different way, placing Aboriginal knowledges in the centre and privileging this knowledge as the way to think about place” (p. 58). Indeed, as Maher (2022) affirms, First Nations knowledges are all around us. In her work as a non-Indigenous educator working primarily with non- Indigenous pre-service teachers, Maher exercises a sense of responsibility to honour First Peoples and to address the ongoing impacts of colonisation, by bringing First Nations knowledges to the centre of curriculum and unlocking opportunities for pre-service teachers to rethink the land in which they are already immersed:
We consider the significance of relations with Aboriginal Knowledges and the peoples and places that hold these knowledges. A non-Indigenous student’s regard for the river as a Belonging Place is brought into relation with consideration of the river as Aboriginal land (and waters). We consider how ‘settlement’ has impacted upon the river, and what our shared responsibility to the waterways [and lands] we live with might be. (Maher, 2022, p. 6)
Likewise, for Hamm (2015), appreciating Country as curriculum is important for multiple reasons, including that doing so disrupts persistent stereotypes of Aboriginality as homogenous:
This disruption acknowledges that Aboriginal Australia is diverse and that each group has its own stories of place, belonging, and ceremony […]. Acknowledging Australia’s Aboriginal history, culture, and ways of knowing as central to understanding the land around us requires thinking about place in a different way [… by exposing] the layers of colonial inscription in the landscape, creating space for the land to be reclaimed and reinscribed with Aboriginal knowledges as the central frame. (Hamm, 2015, p. 58)
Moreover, careful whole-of-school incorporation of First Nations perspectives can and has resulted in quantifiable improvements, the likes of which schools will typically value. Harrison and Greenfield (2011) examined how 12 schools in New South Wales, Australia incorporated Indigenous perspectives.
Reflecting on the project, Harrison and Skrebneva (2020) explain:
Teachers worked together with parents to weave Aboriginal knowledge into the fabric of the curriculum through careful negotiations with Aboriginal Elders and the community (for example, Aboriginal shelters, foods, bush gardens, Aboriginal art and dancing). The teachers at one of the schools reported that their approach to doing business with parents has changed dramatically since 2006, which is evidenced in their statistics on suspensions. In 2006, there were 386 suspensions at the school, in 2007 there were 170 suspensions and in 2008 there were 17 suspensions. Another school constructed an outdoor learning space where Elders worked with students to reconnect them to local places and history. […] The school reported increased student engagement and improved outcomes in the NAPLAN results to the point where all students were achieving minimum standards in reading and writing. (p. 22)
Powerful starting points for understanding Country as curriculum and for appreciating curriculum as a site for negotiation and decolonisation therefore include immersion programmes and LFC frameworks, which benefit from collaborative, ideally, ‘whole-school’ approaches (Burgess & Lowe, 2019; Lowe, Skrebneva, Burgess, Harrison & Vass, 2021). In such approaches, relationships between schools, First Nations’ families and local community/Elders are developed (Fricker, Moodie & Burgess, 2022). These relationships take time to nurture, thus, in their absence or when starting out, it is important that teachers and schools do not allow a fear of tokenism or lack of established relational structures to serve as reason for doing nothing. Neagle (2019) says:
I encourage teachers to get rid of the word ‘tokenism’ […] At its best, it dismisses an act or gesture before one even has a chance to analyse its value (or lack thereof). At its worst, the word allows many thousands of teachers to continue to teach the Anglo- Australian content with which they are most comfortable and continue to exclude Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives. (p. 22)
Shared commitments to embedding the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander CCP, interpreting the APST focus areas 1.4 and 2.4 critically, and auditing curriculum to scrutinise whose voices, perspectives, and knowledges are privileged (Madsen et al., 2021), can therefore serve as important momentum-building practices for schools and centres to slowly decolonise from the ground up.
Although, in many ways, Australia’s mainstream schooling system has a long way to go in “allowing all students to engage in reconciliation, respect and recognition of the world’s oldest continuous living cultures” (ACARA, 2022b, n.p.), and although many challenges exist in terms of how this work can be done both comprehensively and effectively, as Brennan (2022) says, “new discourses about curriculum […] can and do gain traction. […] Teachers, individually, in groups or in projects across sites, already engage in curriculum inquiry” that is culturally responsive, decolonising, and anti-racist, and even “small-scale, local inquiries can thus link up” (p. 88). Brennan adds that curriculum changes mostly occur ‘from below’, meaning that even when they are small, patterns of dedicated practice are important – they generate their own hopeful momentum, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander CCP provides an important resource in effecting broader-scale decolonising change. While, as Maher
(2022) states, “addressing the [Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander] CCP requires structural and school change beyond the efforts of individual teachers, pedagogy is critical” (p. 5). Teachers have agency to make important decisions both about what is included in curriculum and how that knowledge is taught. We thus turn to the importance of pedagogy as a key theme across the literature now.